The Road to Global Health

Working together for a healthier world

By Jessica Kraft

Presented by Pfizer, Inc. and the Pfizer Foundation

Simien Highlands, Ethiopia – After a day-long journey on Ethiopian highways and “bone-jarring” dirt and rock roads, Paul Emerson, Ph.D. arrived in a remote farming village hidden in the country’s largest mountain range. He and his team at the International Trachoma Initiative (ITI) regularly endure this journey to fight trachoma, a preventable infectious disease that is unheard of in the developed world thanks to modern medicine, but still causes blindness in this small community. For the local farmers who paused their work in the middle of the day to come take the trachoma antibiotic, the medicine means more than life-saving care. As one farmer shared, it means someone cares.

Emerson, the program director of ITI, knows firsthand that every village he enters has a diverse set of challenges. Trachoma threatens an estimated 182 million people worldwide, many of them in hard to reach or underdeveloped places. Delivering advanced treatment and health care interventions to these locations requires months of close coordination with local, international and corporate partners, a reality faced by many global health programs. And as the developing world experiences massive societal and economic shifts — such as growing income inequality and an increased strain on public resources and institutions — the global health community is faced with finding more efficient and scalable ways to care for the world’s most vulnerable populations.

In this ever-changing environment, corporations are increasingly filling the gaps. Pfizer, which founded ITI and supports the public-private partnership, has focused its efforts on locally driven and collaborative approaches to create long-term solutions. The pharmaceutical company brings its own resources, including people, products and funding, to tackle health care challenges while supporting long-term capacity building to ensure the problems don’t come back.

“What is important for us and our partners is flexibility and responsiveness to local concerns,” said Caroline Roan, vice president of corporate responsibility at Pfizer and president of The Pfizer Foundation. “We want to identify the people who know what the gaps are in terms of access to health care. Those people are the ones who have the knowledge and the innovative ideas.”

“I was in the field … in the heart of the Simien Highlands”

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— Paul Emerson, Ph.D, director of the International Trachoma Initiative

The company’s efforts are guided by the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were adopted by 193 nations in 2015. The SDGs direct global, regional and national efforts to reduce poverty, mitigate climate change and build inclusive societies. Health care cuts across all of the 17 goals, and is specifically addressed in Goal 3, which states that every person deserves access to quality health care.

By combining its resources with the efforts of local partners, Pfizer is developing and validating innovative solutions to some of the most pressing global health challenges.

People:

Products:

Funding:

Chapter 1

“We’re here … for a mass drug administration against the eye disease trachoma.”

— Paul Emerson Ph.D, director of the International Trachoma Initiative

Leave no community behind

As the experience of Emerson and his team shows, it can be incredibly difficult to bring critical health interventions to remote populations. Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) like trachoma primarily affect extremely poor communities that have limited access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene, and which may be inaccessible for parts of the year due to flooding and other factors.

Reaching these individuals requires collaboration with an array of public- and private-sector partners – from governmental and nongovernmental agencies at the local, national and international levels, to community health workers and volunteers who administer treatments to individuals. To help solve this, Pfizer co-founded the International Trachoma Initiative (ITI) in 1998, and the partnership involves the efforts of more than 100 diverse organizations. The ITI is currently a program of The Taskforce for Global Health. These partners work together to implement the holistic, World Health Organization (WHO)-recommended SAFE strategy for trachoma control: Surgery to treat the blinding stage of the disease, known as trichiasis, Antibiotics to clear infection, Facial cleanliness and Environmental improvement.

“It’s an integrated approach,” Emerson said. “We’re always looking across all the countries for examples of innovation and entrepreneurship, where hygiene promotion, production of soap, sanitation and school-based programs are being used in different and innovative ways to reach more people.”

Through ITI, Pfizer has donated more than 675 million doses of an antibiotic to treat trachoma. But delivering these medicines to affected communities first requires an understanding of exactly where the disease is active. To help guide their efforts, ITI partners employ data gathered through the largest disease mapping initiative ever, which utilized a smartphone-based system to create a household-level overview of where trachoma can be found.

The project, which required the efforts of more than 550 local teams to collect and transmit data from 2.6 million people in 29 countries, has helped ITI and Pfizer reach even more impacted communities by showing exactly where trachoma is present and how much donated medicine is needed. The mapping project has also contributed to building local health capacity in supply chain and data management.

These efforts have contributed to dramatic progress. Since 2011, the number of individuals at risk of trachoma has fallen by nearly 50 percent, and several countries have either eliminated or are on the cusp of eliminating this disease.

Chapter 2

“Woven through our philanthropic approach is the idea of catalytic work.”

— Caroline Roan, vice president of corporate responsibility at Pfizer and president of The Pfizer Foundation

Malawi

Empowering the world’s entrepreneurs

Around the world, organizations and entrepreneurs are implementing creative and disruptive approaches to solve global health challenges. But these solutions require support, including funding, to expand their reach. That’s why the Pfizer Foundation has focused its global health strategy on providing grant and investment funding, along with technical support and mentorship, to accelerate these new, locally driven approaches. In Malawi, for example, the Pfizer Foundation partnered with Save the Children to expand a pilot program that improves access to critical health care for women and children by combining family planning and immunization services.

For women living in Malawi, where most people make the equivalent of $1 per day, quality health care is critical to fostering a more just and equal society. But access to health services is not easy to come by in many rural areas, and women often have few resources to spend on health care and very little time to make clinic visits. Through the Save the Children partnership, women who bring their children to health care facilities for immunizations are also offered family planning counseling at the same site, cutting down on the number of clinical visits and ensuring mothers receive care themselves. Participants in the program report better health outcomes for newborns, higher rates of completion for first-year immunization schedules, improved family planning outcomes and increased confidence and ability for mothers to advocate for their families’ health.

Key to the success of the Pfizer Foundation’s strategy is a focus on partner collaboration and innovation. “Woven through our philanthropic approach is the idea of catalytic work,” said Roan. “We focus on identifying the individuals and organizations that are coming up with new and different ideas to solve pressing global health challenges. We then partner with them to understand what they are trying to solve, and look for ways that Pfizer’s contributions can help them scale and take their work to the next level.”

In line with the collaborative mindset exemplified by its work with Save the Children, the Pfizer Foundation has also created a new program, Global Health Innovation Grants (GHIG), to provide additional grant funding, technical assistance and mentorship opportunities for entrepreneurs and social enterprises pioneering new and potentially sustainable health care programs in their communities. To date, 20 grants have been awarded to growing organizations focused on three areas: improving primary health care delivery, enhancing health care access for women and children and supporting the implementation of health care technologies in low-resource settings.

“One of the most compelling programs we’ve launched in recent years”

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— Caroline Roan, vice president of corporate responsibility at Pfizer and president of The Pfizer Foundation

ayzh, for example, is a social venture project in India that provides low-cost maternal health products. The organization’s core offering is a $3 clean birthing kit that provides mothers with the essential materials recommended by the WHO for a safe and hygienic birth. With the Pfizer Foundation’s help, ayzh has grown rapidly, reaching more than 1.5 million mothers and children with sustainable, low-cost interventions to help reduce maternal mortality and improve women and children’s health. Pfizer Foundation funding is also helping ayzh build two new manufacturing and distribution hubs in Southern India.

By focusing on the needs of communities and providing empowered individuals with the tools and materials to scale, the Pfizer Foundation is helping catalyze long-lasting local health care solutions, even in some of the most remote locations.

Chapter 3

“The single most impactful experience of my career so far.”

— Matt Webb, oncology lead, Czech Republic, Pfizer

Mumbai

Difference makers

When it comes to building sustainable health care capacity, corporations have more to offer than just funding. The professional, medical and business expertise of companies like Pfizer can be crucial to expanding the impact of nonprofit and development organizations.

Pfizer’s collaborative approach to corporate volunteer programs is allowing employees like Matt Webb the opportunity to use their skills and expertise to improve health care systems in low- and middle-income countries. Based in Prague, Webb leads the team responsible for Pfizer’s oncology medicines in the Czech Republic.

Last year, Webb was chosen to participate in the Global Health Fellows (GHF) program, Pfizer’s long-standing international, skills-based volunteer initiative that places Pfizer colleagues and teams on short-term assignments with leading development organizations and local country non-profits. Each fellow works closely with the local office of the organization he or she is assigned to, helping strengthen the organization’s service delivery and operations while also gaining new perspectives on global health challenges.

Along with his Pfizer colleagues from all over the world, Webb was chosen to be part of a Global Health Team – an offshoot of the GHF program that is an intensive, three-week team-based volunteer project. Webb spent his time in Mumbai with V Care, a volunteer-run nonprofit that provides free assistance and education to cancer patients and families in need.

Though he’d worked in cancer care for almost a decade, Webb said the experience in India challenged his assumptions. “What I realized pretty quickly was that the sheer volume of patients that they see at the main cancer hospital in Mumbai means that I had to go right back to the beginning to learn how cancer care really worked,” Webb said.

“I pray for you, I pray that you will be able to continue”

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— Caroline Roan, vice president of corporate responsibility at Pfizer and president of The Pfizer Foundation

Webb and his colleagues collaborated with V Care volunteers to craft a plan for establishing infrastructure and internal processes, as well as defining the organization’s goals and metrics. After the three weeks, and multiple meetings with stakeholders and medical professionals, the group left V Care with a clear roadmap to strengthen its efforts to help cancer patients in the coming year. Pfizer’s support is also ongoing – Webb said his group is regularly in touch with the V Care volunteers they got to know, and the fellows plan to return to celebrate V Care’s 25th anniversary next year.

“It was the single most impactful experience of my career so far,” he said. “It was amazing to see what is possible to achieve as a small number of people if you have a lot of motivation and passion.”

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“What I realized pretty quickly was that the sheer volume of patients that they see at the main cancer hospital in Mumbai means that I had to go right back to the beginning to learn how cancer care really worked.”

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— Matt Webb, oncology lead, Czech Republic, Pfizer

Since the GHF program started 14 years ago, 450 Pfizer colleagues have contributed approximately 360,000 hours of pro bono service across 50 countries. Assignments have focused on optimizing supply chains, developing health program strategies, scaling up promising disease prevention approaches and other areas aimed at increasing access to health care. Through the program, Pfizer has partnered with over 40 international and local development organizations.

Partnering for a healthier world

Strategic philanthropy from the private sector can empower bold innovators, entrepreneurs and local organizations who understand exactly what’s needed in their communities to improve individuals’ lives and increase community health. By connecting its resources with the local knowledge and expertise of its partners on the ground, Pfizer is pioneering a collaborative approach aimed at addressing the needs of underserved individuals now, while building the foundation for long-term global health improvements.

“Nothing can compare ... for me, it's humbling”

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— Caroline Roan, vice president of corporate responsibility at Pfizer and president of The Pfizer Foundation

“There is a recognition that we can’t think of disease in a silo of just medical care anymore,” Roan said. “We must think about the community and solving those issues in an integrative way.”

Only then can the global community ensure that the farmer in the remote Simien Highlands, the mother in Malawi and the cancer patient in Mumbai are not left behind.

Kenya

The Pfizer Foundation is supporting a two-year program by the AMPATH Oncology Institute to improve the continuum of breast cancer care.

Uganda

Caroline Roan, vice president of corporate responsibility at Pfizer and president of The Pfizer Foundation, visits with students.

Malawi

Since 2014, the Pfizer Foundation has supported Save the Children’s efforts to improve access to childhood immunizations.

Malawi

The Pfizer Foundation is partnering with Save the Children in Malawi to provide family planning services at the same sites where women are bringing their children to receive checkups and immunizations.

Kenya

World Health Partners, a Pfizer Foundation grant recipient, operates a network of franchise health centers, led by women entrepreneurs, that bring primary and reproductive health care services to underserved populations.

Kenya

The Pfizer Foundation is supporting a program by World Vision to increase access to family planning and immunization services, including through community health worker outreach and education.

Keyna

2020 MicroClinic is using a Pfizer Foundation grant to expand a program to improve access to maternal and newborn care services for women and children in rural areas.

Kenya

The Pfizer Foundation is providing support to PharmAccess, an organization dedicated to inclusive, high-quality health care for people in sub-Saharan Africa.

Kenya

Through a mobile health savings and payment program, PharmAccess helps increase access to health care and medication for people in sub-Saharan Africa.

Kenya

The Pfizer Foundation is supporting a two-year program by the AMPATH Oncology Institute to improve the continuum of breast cancer care.

The Pfizer Foundation is supporting a two-year program by the AMPATH Oncology Institute to improve the continuum of breast cancer care.

Caroline Roan, vice president of corporate responsibility at Pfizer and president of The Pfizer Foundation, visits with students.

Since 2014, the Pfizer Foundation has supported Save the Children’s efforts to improve access to childhood immunizations.

The Pfizer Foundation is partnering with Save the Children in Malawi to provide family planning services at the same sites where women are bringing their children to receive checkups and immunizations.

The Pfizer Foundation is supporting a program by World Vision to increase access to family planning and immunization services, including through community health worker outreach and education.

World Health Partners, a Pfizer Foundation grant recipient, operates a network of franchise health centers, led by women entrepreneurs, that bring primary and reproductive health care services to underserved populations.

2020 MicroClinic is using a Pfizer Foundation grant to expand a program to improve access to maternal and newborn care services for women and children in rural areas.

The Pfizer Foundation is supporting a two-year program by the AMPATH Oncology Institute to improve the continuum of breast cancer care.

The Pfizer Foundation is providing support to PharmAccess, an organization dedicated to inclusive, high-quality health care for people in sub-Saharan Africa.

Through a mobile health savings and payment program, PharmAccess helps increase access to health care and medication for people in sub-Saharan Africa.